I quickly downloaded and signed up for the app, secured @Perkins as my username and began connecting with friends, mostly in the tech industry, via the platform.

The app itself offered a compelling mix of the intimacy of pre-Generation X Facebook and the shouty absurdity of Twitter. Throw in some Slack-esque command-line interactions, which Peach calls Magic Words, and you’ve got a fairly fun app.

Like many of Peach’s early adopters, I had a good time for the first few days, but the app soon began to languish on my iPhone home screen. Sure, the app has charm, but its long-term appeal is questionable. Besides, there's something far more interesting worth talking about than the merits of Peach itself: how, in a span of minutes, Peach went from nothing, to something everyone on Twitter was talking about.

To learn more about how it took off, I reached out to Tony Sampson, a professor at the University of East London whose research focuses on how things goes viral online and author of Virality: Contagion Theory In The Age of Networks.

“If there were a particular cause-and-effect mechanism, then everything could potentially go viral,” Samspon told me in an email. “Although there is this notion of a cultural and biological inclination to copy and pass on, what gets passed on occurs in mostly accidental ways.”

Sampson believes environment has more to do with virality than content itself.

“If the physical environment or mood atmosphere is right, then things might spread. All you can do is prime the environment, create a mood, and just maybe, the accident will happen,” he said.

How it happened

Image: Mashable composite, Peach

Considering Peach generated massive buzz on a late Friday afternoon just as CES — one of the biggest events in tech — was winding down, it's possible that tech journalists looking for something else to cover played a pivotal role in Peach’s spread. Twitter lends itself well to these sort of events, where its rapid-fire, real-time nature leads to communities of users rallying around a specific situation. When influential Twitter users all tweet about a particular subject, it gets the snowball rolling. Before you know it, it feels like everyone is talking about the same thing.

“Twitter is an environment. It's an affective atmosphere; a mood,” added Sampson.

“While it may seem random, there’s often an underlying reason for something going viral, even if it is hard to see,” Berger said in an email.

“Having an entire focused community all in one place [in this instance, Twitter] helps things spread faster,” he said. “It means people hear about it from other people more times in a shorter period, increasing the likelihood it catches on.”

Making it stick

While we now have a better idea of how Peach caught on, the question remains: will it stick? Neither Samspon nor Berger were particularly bullish on Peach’s future prospects.

“Research we conducted demonstrates that things that catch on faster tend to die out faster,” said Berger. “Fast up often means fast down. People are more likely to think the thing is a flash in the pan, so it may not stick around as long.”

“The process of virality is certainly reversible,” said Sampson. “It’s generally about making small things become big, but the problem with viral events that use up too much energy in the early stages is that they will eventually lose vigour.”

Not everyone shares this opinion, however. Jesse DeWitt, Director of Digital Product Management at Merriam-Webster, runs the dictionary's brand account on Peach and says page engagement is still growing.

“We’re still getting a trickle of followers,” DeWitt said in a phone interview. “It’s not nearly as much as when it first began, but I would say maybe 10 to 20 a day still.”

“I haven’t been scientific with [tracking metrics on] Peach, so this is purely anecdotal, but it does seem to have high engagement,” he said.

DeWitt’s observation from running one of the most active brand accounts on Peach is notable, but it’s incredibly difficult to glean any sort of wider usage data on Peach. A representative for the company declined a request to be interviewed for this article.

The only real data on Peach available is App Store rating data from App Annie. Peach held steady after its first boom, but popularity has slowly waned since its launch. This isn’t a death sentence, but it does seem to have some trouble maintaining the momentum it generated on its launch day.

Peach vs. the others

A look at Ello

Let's place Peach in context with other recent social media phenomenons: Ello and Snapchat. The former burned quickly and brightly, while the latter has slowly taken over the world (or, at least, the world under 25).

Ello is perhaps the most apt comparison since it was the most-recent viral social media phenomenon before Peach. It was initially pitched as a sort of anti-Facebook while the social network was in the midst of a controversy over its “real names” policy, which was seen as discriminatory to the LGBT community.

Ello promised to be friendlier to these marginalized communities and, crucially, it promised no advertising. With concerns over how Facebook was using the massive amount of data it had on its users, Ello seemed like a godsend.

It quickly attracted a lot of hype within tech-savvy circles, with invites to join the network — which wasn’t available to the general public at launch — selling for $150 on eBay. Within the same circles that aided its rise, Ello is now a punchline at best.

Snapchat is almost the complete opposite of Ello. It existed beneath the mainstream from its July 2011 launch, until the beginning of 2012 where it began to climb up the rankings in the iOS App Store, according to App Annie data.

A Google Trends comparison between how popular searches for “Ello” and “Snapchat” are over time is particularly illuminating. Ello’s first boom is actually a little higher than Snapchat’s first, but afterward the difference is brutally stark.

Perhaps Peach doesn’t really offer users an entirely new experience: if you look at the most recent social media success stories, Snapchat, Periscope and Vine (which, incidentally, was created by Peach creator Dom Hoffman), each offers a vastly different experience than the platforms that preceded them.

The difference between, say, Snapchat and Peach is that the former offers users an entirely new experience, while the latter is all about compelling new features but with an experience that isn’t too dissimilar to Twitter and Facebook.

Perhaps the most apt comparison to Peach is Google+. There were a lot of reasons Google+ failed, but its overarching problem is that it just wasn’t all that different than Facebook. Google+ offered new and inventive features, but it didn’t give users any particular reason to migrate from the larger, established social network.

Of course, Google+ failed on a much larger scale than Peach ever could, given that it was created by one of the largest tech companies in the world, which spent, quite literally, a fortune building it. That being said, the comparison is still useful. It could also be argued that Ello has the same problem as Google+.

This isn’t even to say Peach will fail. It may roll out some killer feature that will make its dominance inevitable, but until it does, the Google+ comparison is still valid. Perhaps it could hope to be acquired by a larger player, maybe Twitter, which is in desperate need of new features.

Peach wasn’t great enough to drag me away from my beloved Twitter, but I couldn’t help but think Twitter should adopt Peach’s ingenious Magic Words feature. Being able to search for GIFs, integrate with Shazam, make doodles and add other location data with a simple text command would be a killer addition to the very site responsible for generating Peach's buzz.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.